'd arranged to meet him at Sparky's diner
on Church midway between Market and 18th Street. We had lunch
there last year and so, when we tried to set up a meeting point
again, it seemed a natural choice as it was near the metro
line and, more importantly, we both knew the location.

There was a certain charm to the place - a sort of 50s, laid-back
retro with a community feel. I recalled the waitress last time
was a young woman straight from central casting - an overly
made-up Hollywood type but not obnoxiously so. Bright red lipstick,
heavy mascara, jet black hair like polished ebony fringing
a teenage mug of pure white porcelain - it could have been
grotesque except on her it was like dressing up a doll. She
had the aura of forbidden fantasy. So meeting there was stepping
into another world and made for a curious reunion of old-time
radicals. But ensconced in a padded booth with Formica tables,
we felt comfortable as it provided some distance from that
temporal zone we knew each other last. It was an artificial
venue, a neutral space where we could detach from time's arrow
and focus on each other's narrative - tracing a hesitant line
of reconnection that wiggled like an anxious worm overseen
by two tired old birds.

I arrived early, having walked around the Castro for a while.
But the weather was awful, a driving rain and chill wind that
made my pocket umbrella useless - unworthy as it was of anything
beyond a minor drizzle. So I took refuge in Sparky's about
a half hour earlier than the time we had set.

It had changed. No China doll this time. Just a young kid who
had the appearance of a Castro rent boy working out his shift
to pay for drugs. He was pleasant enough - though the pleasantness
might have been weary stoicism had he been old enough to understand
his escape here from Kansas, or wherever it was he escaped
from, was merely a stopping off point on his slow road to ruin.
The diner, itself, was a mess. They were in the process of
remodeling, he explained apologetically. Where we sat last
year the flooring was now torn up and the booths uprooted.
At this point, I might have left except there was a kind of
seedy allure and, as no one else was there, I had the place
- what there was of it - to myself. So I settled into one of
the remaining booths that had survived the cyclonic wrath of
unseen workmen, ordered a beer from the waiter hovering sadly
over me, took out the free paper I had plucked from a street
rack moments earlier, and perused the feature story that took
up the entire front cover.

The story was about Dan White, the young supervisor who back
in November 1978 shot the mayor, George Moscone, and Harvey
Milk, the first gay activist elected to the city board. The
reason this lurid story was being rehashed had to do with a
film that was being made about the life of Milk who had become
an icon in the historical annals of San Francisco's movement
for Gay Lib. In fact the Castro district was abuzz with tales
relating to the film, as this was a major production
and, therefore, the cause of much excitement. Castro Street
had been made over as a movie set (much to the dismay of the
shops which all had large signs outside trumpeting that they
were open for business during the filming). But the story in
the free sheet had to do with what the paper considered serious
historical inaccuracies in the script that, somehow, had come
into their possession.

The article was essentially an interview with the guy who had
managed White's election campaign back in '77. What disturbed
him was that the film made White out to be homophobic which,
he claimed, wasn't the case. In fact, even though White represented
a Catholic working-class neighbourhood and had once been a
policeman, he was fairly open-minded, as the election agent
could attest since the agent, himself, was gay. What's more,
he claimed, White actually befriended Milk and even admired
him - that is until he came to feel Milk had betrayed his trust.
The film script, however, sought to make White into a sexually
obsessed maniac who killed Milk because he couldn't come to
terms with his own repressed demons.

I thought about this as I drank my beer, occasionally looking
up to see whether my old friend had arrived. San Francisco
wasn't the city I once knew. There was a time when I couldn't
imagine living anywhere else. It was a place where anything
was possible, where candy-coated dreams were nourished and
nurtured (albeit in a haze of cannabis fumes). But then things
began to change. I wasn't sure when it happened or how, but
change it did. And so did I. Now coming back was tough - like
meeting an old lover after a great passage of time. You still
recognise her and see what attracted you but the embers that
once simmered have transformed into dust and the flame in your
heart has grown tepid.

That's why the article about Dan White struck me, I suppose.
I'd been thinking about the change that took place, when it
happened, why it happened and what it meant. Could I put my
finger on the time, the cause? Was there an event that made
everything different then on? No, I doubt if there was. But
if I had to put a date on it, I suppose it would have been
sometime in that period of '78 when the world seemed to crash
down on us and innocence, like the waxen wings of Darius, had
melted in the heat of the midnight sun.

The seventies in San Francisco was a time of hope and struggle.
My wife and I had returned late in '71 from a year in Europe
bringing back with us a baby girl and settling in Noe Valley
which was
just beginning to shift from generations of mainly working-class
Irish and Germans to a more mixed neighbourhood of students
and young professionals. The city, which had become a magnet
for disaffected youth from Poughkeepsie, Kalamazoo, Baton Rouge
and Pocatello was in its prime. The welcome mat was out and
people poured in by bus, plane and rag-tag automobile - refugees
from mainstream America still trying to shake itself free from
post-50s traumas where girls wore dresses of crinoline and
boys married their childhood sweetheart, stuffing her and their
2.4 children inside a faux-gingerbread bungalow situated in
a place called 'Nowhere'. These kids who flooded into the port
of San Francisco wore flowering hempseed in their scruffy unwashed
hair and had exchanged their dreams of a house in the suburbs
for an overcrowded, acid-drenched commune in the Haight. It
could have been a recipe for disaster and sometimes it was.
But, amazingly, mostly it wasn't. These were kids who wanted
to remake the world and San Francisco, circa 1971, provided
the venue to do it.

The years of early to mid-70s were monumental in scope and
operatic in a sort of surreal grandeur. Along with hippydom
there was a growing political fervour against the perceived
hypocrisies and injustices that measured up the ideals of America
with the brutalities of the war in Vietnam and the growing
demands for economic and political justice by people of colour.
The great marches in the South during the sixties gave way
to mass movements in the North led by fiery orators like Malcolm
X who were somehow able to embody and articulate the pain and
suffering of generations and harness them as a mighty cry of
outrage. On college campuses throughout the country mass uprisings
took place and hardly a month went by without a bloody confrontation.

Along with the war in Vietnam there was a growing war at home.
The fervency of youth was pushed to extremes. For every exhortation
to 'turn on, tune in and drop out' there were others, even
louder, to stand up and be counted - to declare which side
you were on. The nation was polarised as never before. But
beyond the rhetoric and the banging of war drums there was
a conviction that change was possible and that untethering
the mind and empowering the imagination would transform the
world in ways we could hardly dream of as dreams, themselves,
had only just been liberated.

We stood poised before a great plateau so immense that we could
only see the vastness and we believed that what lay beyond
our line of sight was the stuff that these newly liberated
dreams were made of.

I was recalling those days, not specific moments as much as
the feelings and the strong sense of destiny that had been
such a part of our lives back then, when I saw my friend walk
in through the door. I'd seen him periodically over the years.
And, over time, he'd become my informant, so to speak, as he
stayed in San Francisco when I left. And I had come to feel
that he was my vicarious presence - my alternative eyes to
view the transition of a city I had much loved.

We greeted each other as always, shaking hands, exchanging
pleasantries, asking about wife and kids. We spoke of projects,
of the constant struggle to break through the invisible barrier
that stood in the way of some ill-defined notion of success
which had less to do with financial rewards and more with a
sense of personal fulfilment.

After catching up on news about the shrinking list of friends
we had in common, I showed him the article I'd been reading
before he arrived - the one about Dan White and the assassination
of Harvey Milk and the mayor.

'White was an interesting character,' I said, 'maybe more interesting
than Milk, himself. But It sounds as if they're using him simply
as a foil.' I pointed to the paragraph that questioned the
motives of the film's writers.

He replied by saying that Hollywood and history might both
begin with 'h' but the similarity ended there.

I had the feeling he was speaking from experience.

I asked him how he imagined life had changed here over the
years. He thought a bit and then said that some of his friends
were finding it hard to live on the edge as they had for so
long. If you didn't have a nest egg, when you reached 60 it
wasn't so easy to scrape by - what with unaffordable health
costs and rising food and housing prices. And how many of us
were thinking of nest eggs back then?

How many of us even thought we'd grow old?

He told me he had several friends who were being forced to
move because the flats where they lived were being made into
condominiums to be sold at extraordinary prices. How would
they ever afford a place in San Francisco after being detached
from rent control?

Where would they go? I asked him.

He shrugged.

Back then, back when I was still living here, right before
all hell broke loose, there was a movement to have the residents
of San Francisco take power into their hands - what power there
was, what hands there were - in an attempt to probe the limits
of the possible. The strategy to achieve this was based around
the fight for community control through district elections.
Up till then, the city's supervisors had been elected at large
which meant, according to those who were behind the district
elections campaign, that only candidates with big money and
corporate backing could ever hope to be chosen as the city's
decision-makers. A referendum was held and won and the first
district elections took place in 1977. It was those elections
that brought Harvey Milk and Dan White onto the board.

I asked my friend what he remembered about Dan White; what
he had thought of him, not now, but then.

'It’s not hard to understand why White was chosen to
represent the Sunnydale district. He'd grown up there - was
part of the staunchly conservative Irish working-class whose
kids became either teamsters or cops or firemen and, probably
still went to church every Sunday ...'

'In a city that prayed less to God than Mammon,' I interjected.

In those days the cultural divide was immense - it would have
been easier to leap over the Grand Canyon than the chasm that
separated the gay community in the Castro from the straight-as-an-arrow
Irish-Catholic bastion in the outlying neighbourhood of Sunnydale.
But some political organisers, like my friend, took a different
view.

'Remember, Sunnydale was a blue-collar San Francisco neighbourhood
that, itself, was divided between union men and union busters,'
he said. 'The same church-going Irish-Catholics could have
cut their teeth in the struggle to organise the San Francisco
docks - or they could have been the bull-headed policemen who
rousted them. And the gays of the Castro sometimes used the
cause of sexual liberation as an excuse to clear the area of
the old working-class culture that was there before them. Who
profited?'

He left the question hanging in the air. And, yes, it wasn't
simply 'us and them'. It never is. The city divide was artificial
but the symbols - exemplified in part by the election to the
board of Dan White, a former policeman and Harvey Milk, a gay
activist from the Castro - had been etched into everyone's
minds back then. They were as different as guns and acid-laced
butter.

'I read that White was a paratrooper in Vietnam during the
Tet offensive,' I said. 'It was the worst job you could have
in the worst days of the war. Nobody survived it without fucking
up their head. Forty years on guys are still waking up terrified
at night, still sweating out the horrors. They left as boys
and came home zombies. And no one fuckin' cared. The war was
over. It was time to move on. The Vietnam vets became a lost
generation.' Having been a soldier myself, albeit a reluctant
one, I had special sympathy for the boys like Dan White who
had been dropped into a nightmare world light years away from
their boxy pink Sunnydale homes.

The
Vietnam War had come to a screeching halt when the NLF entered
Saigon in April of ‘75
and the American Embassy was unceremoniously evacuated. TV
screens visually screamed with agony and humiliation as 7000
American and Vietnamese personnel were helicoptered out of
their final compound and transported like panicked cattle to
aircraft carriers waiting offshore, where the human cargo was
dumped aboard in such haste that even those who despised the
war watched in awe the shameful abandonment of those who, for
whatever reason, had taken refuge under America's tattered
star spangled banner.

By the mid ‘70s, we were nicely ensconced in the corridor
between Noe Valley and the Mission. Positioned over the hill
from the Castro and jutting up against the city's large Latino
neighbourhood, the mix was alphabet soup with salsa on the
side. It had energy, charm, diversity - good food and cheap
housing. But already there were rumblings of what was to
come. The economy was in free-fall recession with an unemployment
rate reaching double digits while interest rates soared into
the stratosphere. The docks which had been clogged with war
cargo five years before were now relatively moribund. The
great
warehouses along the waterfront stood empty, seagulls nesting
in the berths where once giant freighters were tethered,
gangs of burly longshoremen quickly dispatching the cargo
to make room for the next in a queue that stretched from
there
to Japan.

Ever since WWII, there had been a realisation by large business
interests that San Francisco would have a special role in
the post war world. Not as a drop-off point for Pacific goods
-
inland docks with cheaper frontage would better serve the
super-sized container vessels that were on the drawing boards.
As trade
with the orient began to grow, the city had come to be visualised
as the New York of the West - the repository of the bureaucracies
that would oversee the new wealth pouring in from the Far
East, positioned as it was midway between Los Angeles and
Seattle.
This idea of restructuring the city to fit its destined role
- the fight around what was termed the 'Manhattanization'
of San Francisco - was a struggle played out over the course
of
the decade pitting community activists on one side and large
real estate and corporate heavyweights on the other.

In the end it was no contest. The community activists could
win any number of battles because the issues of housing and
lifestyle were so very clear, but the moneyed interests won
the war. When it came down to it, promises of jobs and economic
prosperity trumped whatever a motley band of neighbourhood
organisers could say - especially when the various communities
were blindly divided by issues of alternative cultures.

For many of us the question of what San Francisco was to
become crystallized around the fight to save the International
Hotel.

I didn't have to ask my friend whether he remembered. Anyone
living in San Francisco at the time knew about the I-Hotel
- the struggle to save it and the horrible aftermath.

The old International Hotel was smack in the heart of the
city. It had been the home and cultural centre for an important
part
of the Filipino community. Known as Manilatown, it comprised
a single city block at the lower end of Chinatown, not far
from the bohemian area of North Beach. More crucially, it
jutted up against the edge of the city's financial district
which
was creeping relentlessly westward along Montgomery Street.
To the Master Planners, the I-Hotel was a prime bit of land
and a key piece of property in the scheme to restructure
San Francisco as a modern and more lucrative Babylon.

The building itself had been decaying for years, along with
its elderly residents. But that was part of its charm. 'Manilatown'
resided there in that very building. Demolition of the hotel
meant obliteration of the last vestige of that historic community.
In our eyes - those of us who cared about such things (and
we were many) - the planned destruction of the I-Hotel was
tantamount to uprooting an ancient tribal village and casting
its people into the wilderness. Even more, it focused on
an issue that in many ways summed up our struggle. The question
it evoked was as basic as you could get - whose city was
it?
Ours or those carpetbagging, multinational moneymen?

After planning permission was given to demolish the I-Hotel,
an ad-hoc organisation to save the venerable old structure
swung into gear. The tenants, with amazing support from the
community, stood firm, barricading themselves inside their
tiny rooms. Young artists from the surrounding area set up
workshops pumping out thousands of posters and leaflets and
a wonderful mural of popular resistance sprouted like a revolutionary
call-to-arms on the grimy facade transforming it overnight
into an imaginary fortress that gave the brave but frightened
dispossessed within a magical cloak of many colours which
served as a fantasy shield of miraculous protection.

The spirit of the I-Hotel was stuff of legends. There should
have been a song written about it. Perhaps there was. But
it lived on in hope and dreams - for a while.

It was the story of Davids and Goliaths - except the Goliaths
won. Not easily, not without setbacks. But if winning was
the destruction of the I-Hotel, then the Goliaths won.

What they won was a hole in the ground that remained for
twenty years with a jagged remnant of the wall still showing
bits
and pieces of that wonderful mural like a relic of a monument
that once was. And, as such, it remained as a memorial to
a colossal struggle - a testament to the power of popular
resistance,
if only for the moment, calling out the promise of hope for
the hopeless. But, back then, we could only hear betrayal.

'Hongisto,' I said. 'Remember him?' Hongisto. The son of
Finnish immigrants. Hongisto, champion of the liberalising
wave that
was sweeping through San Francisco. A former cop who fought
discrimination within the police force and had stood up against
police brutality, he became a popular figure among the community
activists. He ran for sheriff in 1971 and, to the surprise
of the political establishment, was elected. His moment of
truth came in the summer of 77. By that time the fight over
the International Hotel had been lost in the courts. An eviction
order had been handed down and it was up to the sheriff's
department to enforce it. Hongisto refused. People were dumbstruck.
No
sheriff in living memory had ever refused to enforce an eviction
order before. The court was furious. Hongisto was hauled
before the judges and thrown into jail for contempt. Then
something
happened. It's not clear what. Maybe he had an epiphany.
More likely he saw his career going down the tubes - and
for what?
A bunch of crazy old codgers living in a rat-infested building
that should have been torn down years before for public health
reasons?

I remember waking up that day in August 77, opening the newspaper,
and seeing the picture splashed over the front page. Some
newsy had captured the moment in an inspired flash. Hongisto,
sludgehammer
poised overhead, about to smash down the door to one of the
barricaded rooms in the I-Hotel. Inside the paper smaller
photos showing, one by one, the residents dragged out, some
of whom
were well into their nineties, shoved into waiting police
vans.

The show was over. The old Filipinos were evicted. Days later
the hotel was razed to the ground. What happened to the I-Hotel
should have lived on in the collective memory of community
struggles. And it did. But something overshadowed it like
a dreadful eclipse that swallows everything in darkness.

There are things that were incomprehensible then and are
still incomprehensible now. But for those of us who were
involved
in campaigning to save the I-Hotel, the incomprehensibility
of that aftermath was total.

My mind flashbacked to those days right before the end -
to the picket lines, each day, getting smaller and smaller.
How
long could people remain on call? There was a phone tree.
Every other morning, the word would go out. This is it! They're
coming.
And people would congregate, shouting, 'They shall not pass!
- No pasaran! - like La Passionara, her voice ringing out
that the fascists would never enter the city of Madrid. But
how
long could we keep it up? How long could people be called
upon to forgo their jobs, their kids, their daily routine
to save
a dilapidated hotel that housed the dying?

And then one day, very close to the end, we had come once
more out of obligation and the picket line was small and
tired and
the word had gone out that, yes, today the police would surely
come and we were all feeling shattered by the futility of
laying our bodies on the line once again - for what? When
suddenly
we saw them. First one bus, then another. It was, to our
eyes, like the cavalry arriving to save the weary survivors
of an
abandoned outpost. And as they disembarked, joyful, energetic,
black, white, Asian, young and old, those of us who watched
in amazement, could only stand back and applaud as tears
welled from the dryness of our eyes, so long parched by the
dust of
crumbling bricks and mortar. Our spirits were lifted like
never before. They sang, they chanted, their numbers so great
that
they surrounded the entire city block. And that morning we
felt that victory was within our grasp, such was the power
of the moment. And then they were gone. And we were alone
again.

A year later, just six days before Dan White exploded, killing
Harvey Milk and the Mayor, I was walking down the street
in the Tenderloin when I heard the news. Jim Jones and his
People's
Temple followers, the very ones we had seen just months before,
marching with us, rich in celebration, comrades in arms,
had committed mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana. Of the
913
bodies that were found, 276 of them were children. I looked
down at the paper again, at the story of the Harvey Milk
film and the question of how Dan White would be portrayed
in it
- so out of context, I suspected.

After that week of horror in the summer of 1978, the shift
was dramatic. Community elections were shelved. After all,
could men like Dan White and Harvey Milk have been elected
by the city at large? City-wide elections might only allow
for well-healed candidates capable of raising large sums
of cash from special interests who would collect their pound
of
flesh later, but, it was argued, at least they probably wouldn't
be gay activists or mass murderers.

The new mayor was a woman who whipped the city into shape.
Within a few years, the skyline had dramatically transformed.
Looking down from my favourite vantage point atop Diamond
Heights, the evolution of San Francisco Mark II was clear.
The skyscrapers
might have been modified for this zone of frequent tremors,
but the message was the same. The great monuments rising
from the sacred downtown soil were banks made of the finest
marble
which now towered over the puny Barbary Coast businesses
that had once survived the '06 quake but now were being levelled
to make room for even more glass and steel monoliths celebrating
the financial bravado of this even Braver New World.

I suppose, in my head, I had left sometime around then. My
body left five years later. But San Francisco, the city I
knew and loved as a youth, has always remained with me. And
part
of it survives, even now.

'There's still an energy here,' said my friend. 'There's
still people I can work with. It's changed but you can still
find
things here if you know where to look.'

Then he paused, finished his drink and said, 'The I-Hotel
has been rebuilt, you know ... '

I didn't. But I wasn't sure it mattered anymore except as
a heritage site's plastic replica.

We paid our bill and left. Outside, the rain had abated but
the street was still wet. We shook hands and promised to
keep in touch. Then we went our separate ways, he up Church
Street
toward the park, me toward Market where I would catch the
metro.

Halfway down the street I stopped and turned around. I watched
my old comrade walking into the distance with a determined
stride. We hadn't talked much about personal things and I
wondered what his life was really like here. The world had
changed those
thirty years and so had we. He stayed and I had left. But
the city we had both known in our youth - it had left too,
except
for the ocean and the hills, the bridges that spanned the
bay and a few assorted landmarks. The rest was in the dominion
of the mind. And that remained eternal.